The research proposed here is designed to explore the impact of maternal employment on the social-emotional adjustment of mothers and children eighteen months after marital separation. Our goal is to examine the direct effects of mother's work status, the quality of the parent-child relationship, and net social support of the single parent household, as predictors of post-separation adjustment (in terms of self esteem, stress symptoms, child disturbance, physical health and behavior problems). We also plan to examine two variables which may help account for why work status itself predicts maternal (and child) adjustment: work-role satisfaction, and traditionality of sex-role attitudes. We will also explore two important moderator variables: family stage (age range of children includes preschoolers, adolescents, or only school age children) and gender of child. Finally, we will compare the adjustment of mothers and children in families where mothers worked full-time, or did not, for at least the preceding two years (including 5 months prior to separation), as opposed to families where mothers significantly increased their paid employment at the time of separation. We believe that the analyses proposed here (which were not planned as part of the original data collection and will not be performed without funding) capitalize on existing data to explore an important question: under what conditions does maternal employment facilitate or impair mothers' and children's adaptation to divorce. Moreover, because we have information available on some key potential interviewing variables, we believe that our data will allow us to begin to understand why maternal employment has the consequences it does under particular circumstance. The research involves secondary analysis of data drawn from a larger sample of separating families. Questionnaires and interview data will be included from 98 mother-custody families, of which 76 involved mothers with a stable work status for the two years preceding and following separation. Funds are requested to permit: transcription of relevant portions of mother interviews; training of coders and coding of mother and child transcripts; scoring of objective test data; keypunching, programming, and data analyses.